Never been here before, but I'm hoping I can find the assistance I need. Thanks for whatever help you can give me or for redirecting me as appropriate. Or for letting me know if I'm messing up your forum with inappropriate requests (not my intent).

So, unless I'm mistaken homicide and suicide are both made from latin words/stems or something. Homi, sui and -cide. One is kill people and the other is kill self.

What I need is two words that would describe the same concept (vs others and vs self) but regarding making someone else/oneself "go crazy" or "lose its sanity".

In the end, these two new words would fit well in a sentence such as: causes of insanity can be natural, accidental, *homicidal*, *suicidal*, or undetermined.

The whole thing's for an homemade RPG, but I'd just like to be able to use words that make some sort of sense.

Thanks very many much!

Cheers! ^_^

Last edited by tristevoix on Wed Aug 20, 2008 10:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

The term "egogenic" was once proposed to describe medical illnesses that were caused by the patient, but the term never really caught on. (Ego is the latin for word "I"). I'm not sure what would be the best term for caused by someone else, though. Maybe "aliogenic" or something based upon alius, which can mean someone else, or another.

Yeah, I though about induce, but then I could say old age induces senility (natural) and a dramatic event induces a phobia (accidental). So, if the alienist was to complete his report and write "induced" next to "Cause of insanity", the investigator could ask "By what, sir?" Unless I misunderstand the word, of course.

But with words like "aliogeny/aliogenic death", the investigator would know right away he's got to look for a criminal.

Well, both "induced" and eDonnelly's invented "aliogenic" (which is lovely) are synonyms, for "caused by an outside agent", or "having an irreflexive cause". It's open as to whether the causal agent is a person, place or thing. â€”Unless eDonnelly says otherwise about his word and everyone agrees, of course.

If you don't want to invent a word, there's inflicted (Latin infligere) and self-inflicted, and (weaker) provoked (Latin provocare) and self-invoked (Latin invocare), but you can always stretch such a word's sense to involve a non-human agent doing the inflicting and provoking/invoking, so you're not much further away from induced and made-up "aliogenic". So if you just want an invented word you have eDonnelly's nice "aliogenic" and maybe you could make "egogenic" catch on ("suigenic" would not be right btw) and you can insist that "aliogenic" only refers to people causing the problem. Why not!

PS Surely, btw, you've already made the distinction in your categorisation scheme that "natural" is everything not caused by people and "accidental" and "self-inflicted" are not so suspicious, and so, by implication, your remaining category is grounds for suspicion of human agency, whatever you call it.

tristevoix wrote:So, unless I'm mistaken homicide and suicide are both made from latin words/stems or something. Homi, sui and -cide. One is kill people and the other is kill self.

Right:

Homicide in Latin is the compound homicidium, where homi- is a shortened version of homini-, combining form of homo, "human," and -cidium comes from cid, a variant of caede-, the stem of caedere, "to kill," and the abstract noun suffix -ium.

Suicide in Neo-Latin is the syntactic (or "pseudo-") compound suicidium, where the sui is not a normal combining form, but the word sui, "of oneself."

tristevoix wrote:What I need is two words that would describe the same concept (vs others and vs self) but regarding making someone else/oneself "go crazy" or "lose its sanity".

If you want to use homicidium and suicidium as patterns, then I recommend: